Hey
@HobeSoundDarryl sorry to hear about the USB RAID troubles, did you say what model of RAID enclosure you’re having problems with?
It has its own hardware RAID controller, it’s not using any software RAID / drivers? You’ve checked with the manufacturer for firmware updates etc?
I have an
OWC USB-C RAID I can do some testing with when my Studio Ultra arrives in the next few days. Also have TB3 Thunderbay 4 RAIDs which use SoftRAID for RAID5. I’m curious to test USB drive performance myself.
This will be my first M1 Mac, I’ve read that the USB4 / Thunderbolt 4 controllers on the Apple Silicon Macs have
worse USB 3 drive performance compared to Intel Macs. (see this thread) But that the Thunderbolt performance (and USB 4 performance?) is pretty good. It could be that there is an incompatibility of some kind between the USB / RAID chips in your enclosure and the M1’s USB controllers.
A colleague of mine was having trouble recently with frequent disconnects on a new USB 3.0 external HDD and an Intel Mac, turns out the issue was a USB-A to USB-C adapter she was using, the problem went away when we bought her a new USB-B to USB-C cable. But sounds like you’ve already tried different cables with no luck.
Unfortunately, mine is a OWC RAID, purchased new in 2018. Like many of their dual drive boxes, it includes a selectable switch to choose the desired RAID-type (I set it to RAID-0 when purchased) and then formatted it APFS with Disk Utility. It works perfectly fine and remains consistently connected to Intel Macs using the
same cable. However, I did try other cables too, including a hope that maybe using a USB-C cable instead of USB-A might make a difference (both to USB-B on the RAID end). No luck.
I hope you will post your test results as I continue to look for a (stay-connected) RAID enclosure I can buy that doesn't require me to buy hard drives too (unlike a Lacie HDD-RAID some have claimed works fine).
After ruling out every controllable variable I could, I reached the "give up" point and purchased OWC Ministack STX and installed ONE large HDD in it, giving up about half of the total storage in the RAID for a single drive setup. That connects via Thunderbolt and has remained consistently connected since (7 days now). All kinds of single drive enclosures I was testing to try to rule out faulty Studio USB ports- including pretty old enclosures- all worked just fine during testing: no unexpected ejections. Apparently what U in USB means for single drive enclosures fully applies. Apparently U is just hit or miss with multi-HDD RAID enclosures. This thread is packed with LOTS of people seeming to have no such issue with multi-
SSD RAID enclosures, so an issue seems focused in on multi-drive,
HDD RAIDs.
Ministack STX is independently powered, so as one more test I could do, I plugged the RAID into one of the Ministack Thunderbolt ports to see if maybe it- as middleman- would keep the RAID consistently connected. A hypothesis was maybe Studio is overly tuned on minimizing power that it would drop below some threshold needed to keep the link to the RAID, driving "unexpected eject." Inserting Ministack in between Studio and RAID might not have what I presume to be the same bug. However, this made no difference. Ministack and the single drive within remained/remains consistently connected, RAID would be available as normal for up to about 3 hours or so and then randomly "unexpected eject" even if Studio definitely did not sleep during that time. No big surprise: I had already tried a few other "middlemen" powered hubs on hand but this offered the
unique test of a Studio to STX connection via Thunderbolt cable.
Having attempted to rule out all I can, I'm left with only the unique variables of Studio (brand new Mac), M1 (vs. Intel), Monterey (vs. earlier versions of macOS running on those Intel Macs). Every other USB device I connect to Studio seems to work as expected, so I'm heavily doubting something wrong with Studio hardware. I also ruled out bad single port by trying ALL of them (the 2 on the front too). If the problem is Studio hardware, I think the whine would be much louder and diverse.
Similarly, M1 Macs have been out for a long time and obviously most people are having no issues with attached drives from third parties. So I'm doubting the issue is hardware related to M1.
That leaves Monterey. I wish I could install pre-Big Sur macOS on Studio to simply see what would happen with this RAID if Big Sur and Monterey were fully ruled out. My strongest belief is that the issue is a macOS bug(s), probably around since Big Sur given what I read online trying to resolve this issue.
I did speak to OWC tech support and interpreted the exchange to mean that Apple is well aware and that the bug is in macOS Monterey. But of course, the easiest thing in the world to do in situations like this is to deflect. So Apple can blame third party hardware and third party hardware can blame Apple... and/or both can blame cables (though I've tested through 3, all of which are fine when connecting same hardware to Intel Macs). A consumer has no way to really figure out where the
actual issue lies if that consumer has ruled out everything they can test themselves.
Could be Studio. Could be M1 Ultra. Could be Monterey. Could be OWC enclosure. I want to believe the U in USB is actually literal... which it certainly seems to be with everything else I've connected and tested, including some near-antique USB enclosures. This RAID with the same cable remains consistently connected to Intel Macs running pre-Big Sur macOS. That makes me doubt the "blame OWC enclosure" option. It does work just fine connected to Studio for some period of time... up to about 3 hours... before unexpected eject. If I turn it off and back on, I may be good to go for another up to about 3 hour span of time.
I hope your OWC HDD-RAID remains consistently connected to your new Studio. With us both having the SAME Mac, I'm very interested to know how that goes. I'll hope it goes better with
your specific OWC RAID box.
